Roughly a year and a half ago, I decided that I had reached the end of my rope with regards to my family’s financial situation. We weren’t poor by any stretch, but we didn’t have any savings to speak of and we were essentially living paycheck to paycheck. Being a man in his 30′s with a wife and two children, that didn’t sit well with me, so I decided to do something about it: I started freelancing in addition to my regular day job.
The aforementioned day job was working as a web developer for a small creative shop, so it was only natural that most of my freelancing work be doing similar things. So, I started building websites for people in exchange for money. We started paying down some debt and the belt wasn’t quite so tight anymore. Life was good. Mostly.
See, instead of hanging out with my friends and such like, I was now working what was, in effect, two jobs. I had my day job where I’d work from 8-6 and after the kids were in bed, I’d head into my home office for another 3-5 hours of contract work. Yes, the money was nice, but (and I didn’t really realize this at the time) I was conditioning myself.
Not long after that, I got a wild hair up my butt to write an ebook about a piece of software. I drafted most of it during my lunch breaks and on strategically-taken vacation days. Fast-forward a few months and the ebook is very close to being finished: I also start a new job (for the same company whose product I was writing about — go figure). I realized that I was going to have a pretty hard time selling something online without a blog of some kind, so I launched this site. A couple weeks later, I launched the book. That was almost exactly a year ago, as I type this.
Things are different now. The ebook has sold well enough so that my wife doesn’t need to work anymore and can be the full-time mom she’s wanted to be since our son was born in 2005. I work at home now, both during the day and at night. I get to have lunch with my kids every day and my “commute” is how ever long it takes me to walk into my office (which is about 6 feet from my bedroom). I get to play the music as loud as I want to and I can wear a toga to work if I so choose. It could be much, much worse.
So, what’s next?
Well, I’ve already whined about my own procrastination with regards to Evernote Essentials v2, so I won’t belabor that point. Once that’s done, however, I do have another project in the hopper that I’m really excited about. I expect to launch it sometime in the early fall, so keep your ears/eyes open around that time.
Looking back on the past year, it’s been absolutely batshit insane. And I have all of you to thank.
Here’s to another year. Thanks for indulging me.
Photo by eflon